Fernando Alonso insists suggestions of tension between him and his Ferrari team have been fabricated by the media to sell newspapers.

Alonso appeared to criticise his team on his pit-to-car radio during qualifying at the Italian Grand Prix and after the Hungarian Grand Prix in July he was scolded by Ferrari president Luca di Montezemolo for being negative. Media reports also suggest tensions are rising on the back of news Kimi Raikkonen is being considered as a Ferrari driver next year.

"Concerning yesterday, it's the third or fourth consecutive race that some people have tried to create some tension between the team and the drivers," he said. "Then we come to the press conference, we explain everything but obviously this doesn't sell so many newspapers - normality."

There are also suggestions that tensions at the team stem from another year of Red Bull success while Ferrari has struggled to stay on the pace. After Sebastian Vettel won again at Monza, Alonso admitted his championship chances are now slim.

"Well, I think we need to be realistic about the championship now there's a very big gap," he added. "We don't have enough races and probably we don't have the speed right now to win some consecutive races and hope to reduce the gap just by pace. We need to be lucky and we need to have some DNFs from Sebastian or something to win the championship.

"With the races left and the points disadvantage, it's hard but in a way, it was exactly the same last year. We could only lose the championship, with 41 points advantage in front of Sebastian after the Monza race. It was difficult for him to catch up and so it was maybe up to us. We didn't complete the job and we had a DNF in Suzuka and some other problems. There's still a long way to go; we will try until the last race to be as good as we can and score as many points as possible and then in Brazil we will see how many points we have compared to him."